if it wasn't for the webui, a bare git repo would suffice. any repo can be a remote. it's distributed, after all.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
73 points (98.7% liked)
Selfhosted
57575 readers
1367 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
But ci/cd though
forgejo supports woodpecker CI I thought?
Why not forgejo's built in ci/cd? Its worked great for me so far?
I didn't even know that's a thing! Looks like it's somewhat new. What a time to be alive!
Jenkins has fairly solid Gitea/Forgejo integration :)
Forgejo + Tailscale. Forgejo is the app behind Codeberg so it's battle tested. I switched to it from Gitea after the controversy.
I finally decided to make the move off github a couple weeks ago and ended up self hosting with Forgejo. It was really easy to set up, and my buddies and I are loving it. Provides a robust web interface and handles pull requests with automatic merges and all that. I haven't had any issues thus far
Forgejo is the way
Gitea is the answer, configure/install with docker. I have had mine going for a few years now and haven't had to touch it besides updating the docker container which I automated.
why gitea instead of forgejo?
Why forgejo instead of gitea?
Forgejo was soft forked from Gitea after they went commercial and changed the license (I think). If there aren't any so far, expect pay walled features eventually.
Forgejo turned into a hard fork after communication issues between the teams. I haven't looked too deeply into it (as I don't really care about the fact that it's a hard fork now). This means while it used to be a drop-in replacement allowing you to go back and forth between the two, it's now an active conversion, I think.
Thanks for answering my question instead of only downvoting like half the other chuckleheads. Guess I'll migrate to Forgejo if my Gitea instance ever gets too old.
You should probably migrate now, forgejo is currently a soft fork that is fully compatible, but in the future they are planning to hard fork and not be compatible. Well, they are in the process of doing so right now.
Good to know, I'll look into it this weekend.
Forgejo didn't exist when I installed gitea.
Same, but fuck the docker overhead
Just curious - what do you mean by the docker overhead?
CPU, RAM, disk space, network translation, management abstraction, buried logs ...
Didn't use docker then fairly sure there is a Deb for it.
I love Forgejo, I'm glad you are happy with it too. Their upgrade process is pretty minimal/straightforward (at least it has been so far) and their runner configuration is a bit heavy to set up initially (I maybe took the security recommendations a bit too intensively despite the fact that I'm running a completely private site, but allowing systems that run arbitrary commands automatically is legitimately a bit intimidating) but has been really nice and reliable now that it's working.
I've used Gitea before, Frogejo also looks pretty good
If you're looking for a bare bones solution, and you already have a machine that you can SSH into, you could just use that. There are desktop GUI/TUI apps galore that you can use to inspect commits, branches and such.
At work I'm in the process of planning a move from Subversion to Git. So I've been looking at Forgejo, a hard fork of Gitea maintained by Codeberg. It has all the important features of other forges like GitLab and Gitea. But is completely open source.
I’ve set up a few gitlab servers at companies and it’s always been well received. Doing it from scratch may be more complex than you want, but I think there are docker images for a more turnkey type solution. And the option of building CI/CD pipelines in the future is always nice to have.
Just host a bare git repo.
I'd prefer it to have a website UI just in case I want to take a quick look at something when I'm not home.
Over a VPN, right? I always recommend not exposing services to the Internet if you can avoid it.
Jokes aside, yes.
Forgejo seemed to be the winning answer so I tried setting it up. Total setup time was less than 10 minutes.
Just a heads up... I haven't looked at this since forever ago (when foregjo was gitea), but make sure you have a restore plan. I think there's a dump command but no restore.
I second the option of Git + SSH. That will scale to one hundred repos. And if you don't want the repos to be checked out, use "git clone -n" to not do that. It'll just be dozens of repos which only have the minimal .git/ directory. All other repos that specify this one as the upstream will have no issues pulling or pushing code.
You won't have PR features nor a web UI though.
@idunnololz I'm running gitea and tailscale. Sadly I had not heard of Forgejo at the time or I might have went with it instead. (Might switch over if i get bored or an itch one afternoon). Works great for me though.
It's monstrous, but gitlab installs from one big RPM on a base box; and with one config file you're up.
While I agree, out of the box the configs ARE NOT for home lab use.
For sure. And their bumbling has made it harder to deactivate all the useless bloat and get the good web-editor back. And a host of other mind-numbingly short-sighted decisions that show they're fully run by LostBoy coders who were never mentored and just don't know better.
But tuning can come after. And their CI is way fucking better than forgejo's facepalm of a GitHub clone. And that's a thin reason, but, yeah.
Yep.
It's like they wanna get bought to compete with GitHub or something.
They're moving fast and breaking things. And bloating their product in the process. In the last 24 months they paid over $1M to a single bug bounty hunter who basically took them to the cleaners.
But totally agree. It's the best UX, best product for home lab or even small enterprise use if you've got someone to get it tuned appropriately.
If all of the below doesnt work out, you can host git by itself. I did that at an office once.
https://gist.github.com/Kreijstal/28fc987270b71849505bbc89b3f2d90a steps look correct.
But for me forgejo worked out well for my side projects and mirroring.
Self-hosting gitlab?
Surely this is the correct answer.
GitLab is awesome and has good CI-CD
I'd go for Forjego or Gitea.
I personally don’t host yet anything, but do know of a friend with a functional Gitea at home
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #157 for this comm, first seen 11th Mar 2026, 23:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]